Many of these phrases are explained in The Oxford Book Of Ships And The Sea, Oxford University Press, Peter Kemp, editor. Some of the explanations are pretty dull compared to this thread, but they're much easier to swallow. It's amazing to me how many common words and phrases come to us from the days of sail. But it was a pervasive technology. Where we see one container ship with a crew of maybe a dozen or so, our great-grandparents would have seen dozens of ships and hundreds of sailors. And its nearly gone, except for the way they talked.
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